Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Birds, beasts and flowers
DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind of opinionated prickliness when things are not what they seem to be or should be.
The Stilled World
Unsentimental, sparing and unspecific, the painter Patrick Pye has sought figurative images to represent symbolically “the archetypes of our humanity” depicted in an alternative universe where expiation has been achieved.
The Curator of Chiaroscuro
Sebastião Salgado’s latest book of photographs represents nature more as a New Age dream of harmony rather than the random mayhem and violent contingency it actually is.
Brave Answers
A new collection casts further light on the clergyman-poet RS Thomas and his two great subjects, God and Wales
The Empathy Man
Finishing a novel for Colum McCann feels like finishing a PhD. He upends the traditional maxim to “write what you know” in favour of writing “what you want to know”.
The Meaning of Ryanair
Orwell got it wrong. It is not governments but banks, insurance companies, pension funds and low-cost airlines, the raucous cheerleaders of deregulation, that oppress and stupefy us with a network of small and baffling rules.
The Gentleman Naturalist
Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution have weathered well and he cannot be held responsible for those who have developed a repugnant politics on the back of a vulgarisation of them.
Casement Wars
Roger Casement dared to dream and turned out to be a nation-builder, regardless of the foolish attempts of his more enthusiastic supporters to deny the reality of his sexual nature. If that was accepted, his stature would rise.
The Hunger Angel
Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller looked with the eyes of the victim on the political masters of terror and called it by its name.
Patrick Pearse Predicts the Future
Writing in 1906, the man who would later be one of the leaders of the Easter Rising envisaged a future one hundred years hence in which Ireland would have made enormous strides and English would be taught in schools only…
One Book, Two Cities
James Plunkett’s classic novel reminds us of a society in which the poorest lived in the most appalling and hopeless conditions and the middle and upper classes were barely conscious of their existence.
Good Time Girls
The Profumo Affair helped defeat a government and usher England into the Swinging Sixties. But the villains of the piece were not the politicians or the young women whose names became famous but the sleazy and prurient popular press.